The present invention relates in general to the field of web portals, and in particular to operating a portal environment.
Web portals allow a single entry point to provide a role-specific personalized view of applications and web contents of an enterprise by end users. Applications and information coming from multiple sources are aggregated into a portal page that serves a specific business need to help site visitors, customers, or employees get to their individual goals more efficiently. This could mean, for example, helping an employee to get the individual job tasks done more quickly and do faster and better decisions because all relevant information and applications are immediately at hand on the corresponding portal page, or helping a site visitor to find target information and application for her or his specific user profile. In those portal systems, the portal page is typically assembled by page editors putting the right set of application components (typically portlets) and the right set of accompanying web content onto those pages and then exposing those pages to individual user roles as needed. The web content, in turn, is typically created by content authors using a web content management system that provides the means to efficiently create web content supporting concepts like workflow based approval processes for new content, previewing of new draft content, versioning, reusable design components to support consistent look and feel, targeting of the right content to the right user profiles, archiving and syndicating newly created or modified content from an authoring system to individual delivery systems.
On the other hand, the industry sees an emerging trend for social web sites that typically provide a fixed set of services like Wikis, Blogs, Communities, Shared Bookmarks, or File Sharing, that can be used by users to collaborate on their individual topics of interest. On those platforms, the end users typically create their own wikis or communities according to their individual needs and other people can just join in and participate in the collaboration, which typically is based on the following set of interactions: create new information, e.g. posting to a blog, updating a wiki page etc., sharing information, e.g. uploading a file or posting a relevant bookmark etc., and giving feedback, e.g. via adding recommendations or adding comments to information that other users have posted etc.
Integrating portals with external web sites like social sites is attractive since this allows offering strong collaboration services in combination with the right set of custom applications and managed web content to provide web sites that make the users even more productive as compared to using separate traditional portal pages and social sites.